Bruins recover from rough start to beat Tampa Bay, 3-2

The Bruins’ prized penalty-killing units gave up two goals in the first half of Saturday’s first period, but they and goalie Anton Khudobin recovered. The Bruins came back to win, 3-2, behind their first two power-play goals of the season at TD Garden

The Bruins were bound to give up some power-play goals, for instance. One of these games, one of their top two lines – maybe even both – was going to fail to score a goal. And Tuukka Rask was going to have to take a day off.

That all happened on Saturday afternoon at TD Garden, but a funny thing happened there, too: Certain other laws of averages worked in their favor.

The B’s scored their first two power play goals of the season at home. They got a goal from a new version of their third line. And Anton Khudobin finally got to see what it was like to play a real, live NHL game at the Garden.

It felt pretty good.

“I think it’s a character win for us,” said Khudobin, who hadn’t played since Feb. 15 at Buffalo, and whose only previous outing at TD Garden was the Black and Gold scrimmage on Jan. 15. “We’re down after 10 minutes, 2-0. We came back, scored three goals, and they didn’t score on us.

“I think we played great.”

There was a little more to the Bruins’ sixth straight victory, a 3-2 victory decision over the stumbling Lightning (four straight losses) than Khudobin’s matter-of-fact rundown.

The 26-year-old, for instance, left out how Steven Stamkos, the NHL’s dominant goal-scorer (and current leader with 15) since 2009-10, first made him a victim, but ultimately cost his team the game.

Stamkos rifled a power-play goal past Khudobin (22 saves to improve to 3-1-0 this season) after just 5:32, and was on the ice when Alex Killorn nicked the Bruins’ league-leading penalty-killers (still an outstanding 91.9 percent) for another goal and a 2-0 lead at 8:38.

But long after a Bruins comeback of an overdue sort, Stamkos made a terrible mistake. With his team shorthanded late in the third period, he blasted a shot wide of the far post, and when the puck went around the boards and out of Boston territory to Patrice Bergeron, the B’s had a 2-on-1. Bergeron fed Brad (Money in the Bank) Marchand, who scored the winner with just 2:16 to play.

“Those are the goals you want to get – the important ones,” said Marchand, who leads the B’s with 11 in 18 games – the last four of them game-winners. “You always want to be on the ice in those big situations.”

Many Bruins might have preferred to avoid the ice during power plays entering Saturday’s game. The B’s were 0 of 26 through their first seven home games, but the end of that drought was inevitable, too. It came 3:22 into the second period, on the Bruins’ second manpower advantage of the game, when Tyler Seguin beat Mathieu Garon (24 saves) with a spectacular shot just beneath the crossbar from the weak side.

Page 2 of 2 - That goal brought the B’s to within 2-1, and they tied it on a goal from their slumping, shaken-up third line, which had Daniel Paille replacing Chris Bourque at left wing. Paille picked up an assist when Rich Peverley scored for just the third time this season, making it 2-2 just 1:17 after Seguin scored.

Things went back to normal after that. Khudobin recovered, and so did the penalty-killers, who snuffed six straight Tampa power plays after giving up the two early goals.

“The game is never finished in 10 minutes,” Khudobin said. “It’s finished, always, in 60-plus minutes, you just have to continue to do your job.”

Finishing the job the way they did added even more flavor to what was always going to be the marquee match-up of the weekend. Regardless of how Montreal fared against Pittsburgh on Saturday, first place in the Northeast Division is officially on the line in tonight’s Bruins-Canadiens battle at the Garden (7:35, NBC Sports Network, WBZ-FM 98.5).

“They’ve got a lot of the same things going for them right now that we do,” said coach Claude Julien, whose Bruins are now 14-2-2. “I’m looking forward to it. I like those kinds of games.”